Paul Krugman has been incessantly complaining about some Sanders supporters who accuse him and other high-profile Sanders critics, especially academics, of conflict of interest. The Sanders supporters allege all manner of self-interested reasons for the Sanders animus, much of it (including Krugman’s) expressed with vitriol.

I’m not among the Sanders supporters who subscribe to the academics-who-want-a-position-in-the-Clinton-White-House general theory. And making that charge against Krugman is ridiculous. But there is one virulently anti-Sanders healthcare economist who I’m betting is motivated exactly by personal ambition: Emory University’s Kenneth Thorpe.*

Thorpe, a Clinton administration healthcare official, gets his Sanders’-single-payer-critique cred because he worked on the failed Vermont single-payer plan. Just before it was about to begin being implemented last year, the governor, a supporter of the plan, agreed to kill it because it became clear that its costs would significantly exceed former projections.

Weirdly, the failure of the Vermont plan is used, by Thorpe and others, as evidence that single-payer could not be cost-effective nationally. As if the tiny state of Vermont has the same contractual bargaining power, regulatory power, medical training funding power, and any other relevant power as the federal government has.

Thorpe recently made big news with a report that deconstructed the Sanders plan as little more than witchcraft in its cost savings and costs overall and in its costs to this or that entity—the federal government, the states, etc. But in a January 29 response published at Huffington Post, two healthcare economists, David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler—both with credentials at least as impressive as Thorpe’s—deconstructed the Thorpe deconstruction as, well, odd in light of certain facts. Including several that Thorpe earlier had used.

Not to worry. Thorpe last week came up with a new headline grabber, this one likely intended to respond to us Sanders supporters who think Sanders would do better in November against Trump than Clinton would. (Or, it now seems likely, courtesy largely of elderly and middle-aged Southern African-Americans, will.) It is an issue that this week has become red hot now that Trump is the probable Republican nominee. And as of this week we Sanders supporters are no longer alone in thinking that Clinton is not quite the perfect candidate to compete against Trump. According to the NYT, the Clinton campaign itself now shares our concern.

Sanders estimates a middle-class family of four would pay an annual premium of $466 under his plan, with no deductible or co-pays. Less affluent households would pay less than that, or nothing at all.

But for at least 72 percent of households enrolled in Medicaid — in which someone is working — the costs of Sanders’s plan would exceed the benefits, according to an analysis by Kenneth Thorpe, a public-health expert at Emory University.

That figure includes 5.7 million households, or 14.5 million people — among them, 4.2 million Hispanic recipients and 2.5 million black recipients. The requirements for eligibility for Medicaid vary widely by state, so that group includes some households living in poverty as well as some that are modestly better off.

How? Well:

“The vast majority of low-income Medicaid workers, who are probably predominantly minority, are going to end up paying more in terms of payroll taxes, and aren’t going to receive really any financial benefits,” said Thorpe, a former Clinton administration health official.

Many lower-income people are already insured or eligible for insurance under Medicaid, at least in the states that expanded the program under President Obama’s health-care reform. Many Medicaid beneficiaries also work, and those workers’ wages would likely decline due to the additional 6.2 percent payroll tax the proposal would levy on their employers.

The lengthy blog post is titled “Study: Bernie Sanders’s health plan is actually kind of a train wreck for the poor.”

That, presumably, is because of course Sanders could not, or at least would not, tweak the plan to remove the payroll tax for people who qualify for Medicaid under current federal law. Because although the ACA is a very complex and very lengthy statute that took a year of drafting and amending to finalize, Sanders surely has thought of every possible issue and when that one came up he simply said, “Too bad.”

Sort of like Hillary Clinton, who regularly professes plans to build on Obamacare and move toward universal coverage for all—$10,000 deductibles? No prob.—but who never hints at what her building plans are, and, curiously, is never asked. Not by the likes of Thorpe or Krugman. And not by the likes of anyone else I know of.

But she’s definitely working on a plan for that move-toward-universal-coverage thing, and, as with the release of the transcripts of her highly-compensated speeches to large finance-industry and other big-corporate players, she’ll give us a hint about how she plans to do that the very minute after the Republican presidential candidates outline their plans to move toward universal healthcare coverage.

Or instead, she could refer us to Thorpe. Since he will again be a healthcare official in the Clinton administration.

*This entire paragraph was inadvertently deleted before the post was published. So now it’s back. And the post makes sense!

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UPDATE: Reader J.Goodwin and I just exchanged these comments in the Comments thread:

J.Goodwin

March 1, 2016 6:08 pm

Is there a reason we should anticipate that it would be significantly different than the Health Security Act?

I.e. larger federal subsidies and a stronger employer mandate than the ACA?

Me

March 1, 2016 6:54 pm

I think it wouldn’t be anything at all, J.Goodwin. I think it’s outrageous of her to keep saying generically that she wants to build on the ACA without saying what she wants to do, yet criticize Sanders for his plan.

And I think it’s outrageous of the Hillary shillary economists brigade–Thorpe, but Krugman too, and probably others–for not mentioning that she has said nothing at all about what she has in mind, yet keeps saying she has, well, something in mind.

Then again, I don’t know why Sanders hasn’t pointed out that she’s taking a page out of the Republican playbook: just keep saying you plan to do something about the uninsured; just don’t say what that is.

Added 3/1 at 6:59 p.m.

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**Sentence edited and separated from preceding paragraph, to make sense. 3/2 at 2:19 p.m.

Gotta tell ya, Microsoft updated its Office 365 last week, and since then I’ve had nothing but big problems trying to write anything using Word. With this post, two main parts were just missing from the post by the time I pasted it into AB’s new-post function. There was the mysteriously deleted paragraph that I reinserted last night, and there was a sentence between this now-edited one and the preceding paragraph, and they were two separate paragraphs, as they are now.

This post is not the only thing that the Word update has made very hard for me to write. I am not happy about this, and do not look forward to calling Microsoft and having them FIX THE SETTINGS SO THAT I CAN USE WORD AGAIN.

“… Not to worry. Thorpe last week came up with a new headline grabber, this one likely intended to respond to us Sanders supporters who think Sanders would do better in November against Trump than Clinton would. (Or, it now seems likely, courtesy largely of elderly and middle-aged Southern African-Americans, will.) It is an issue that this week has become red hot now that Trump is the probable Republican nominee. And as of this week we Sanders supporters are no longer alone in thinking that Clinton is not quite the perfect candidate to compete against Trump. According to the NYT, the Clinton campaign itself now shares our concern.

I just corrected the original post at Angry Bear and added a note at the bottom raging about Microsoft’s update to Office 365 that has caused big, big problems for me in drafting anything in Word. In this case it mysteriously deleted an entire paragraph, which I reinserted last night, and also a sentence that had prefaced the one mentioning Ehrenfreund’s blog post and making clear that his post was about Thorpe’s latest attempt to take down Sanders’ healthcare plan, not about the Clinton campaign’s concerns about the strength of Trump’s candidacy and problems with her own.

Not a single R vote has been cast as I type this but all the smart money is on Trump running the win table tomorrow with the exception of maybe Texas. This may not translate into the hugest (or Yuuuugest) pot of delegates compared to the other but will firmly establish the R race as Trump vs the Others.

And the Others have a choice between now and the Conventions. Do Hillary’s dirty work for her while she sits back and triangulates between left, center and center right, saving her own attacks dogs like David Brock for the General. Or just pivot and sign up like Christie and Brewer and Sessions as officer/supporters of the Army of El Douche.

For example Trump’s weaseling around the KKK issue elicited a response from Clinton that was about as hard hitting as “My that wasn’t a nice thing to say”. Because for this weekend at least she doesn’t have to make the case that Trump is the White Supremacist candidate: his new supporters are making that clear as day and his erstwhile R opponents are forced to make hay by trying to shame Trump’s base with accusations of racism. Which given the history of the R’s Southern Strategy since 1968 might as well be the illustration of ‘cognitive dissonance’ in Webster’s Dictionary.

Will the Republican Establishment allow Rubio to wage all out war on Trump between now and June? When that looks to drive up Trumps negatives beyond their already high levels for November? That is de facto acting as Hilary’s Oppo Research Deployment Team? I wish I had answers as good as the question. Over to you all. For live commenting the day time developments or just frankly speculating on tomorrow evenings results. And the week after. And the three months after that.